Stephen Robertson

Director

Stephen Robertson is best known in digital history for his work on Digital Harlem, which he created with his collaborators in the Black Metropolis project. Digital Harlem won the American Historical Association's Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History and the ABC-CLIO Online History Award of the American Library Association in 2010. He and his collaborators are currently developing the site to offer a spatial perspective on the 1935 Harlem riot.
Robertson is the author of Crimes against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880-1960 (University of North Carolina Press, 2005) and co-author of Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars (Harvard University Press, 2010). He has published articles on sex crimes, modern childhood, legal history, everyday life in 1920s Harlem, and undercover investigation in journals such as Gender and History, Journal of Social History, Journal of Urban History, and Journal of the History of Sexuality. His current research examines private detectives and the practice of undercover surveillance in the United States between 1865 and 1941.
Robertson has won a number of teaching awards, including a Carrick Australian Award for University Teaching Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning in 2006 and a Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Excellence in Teaching Award in 2008.
Prior to joining RRCHNM, Robertson taught at the University of Sydney from 2000 to 2013. From 1998-1999, he was the JNG Finley Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University, and he was previously a post-doctoral fellow at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago. He received his PhD from Rutgers University, and his undergraduate degrees from the University of Otago, in New Zealand.
He blogs at http://drstephenrobertson.com/ and about Digital Harlem at http://digitalharlemblog.wordpress.com.